I was in a suburban convenience store, near London’s outer rim, where the growing city bleeds into nature. A bag of sweets caught my eye, branded as BRAIN ROT.
Oxford’s word of the year for 2024, “brain rot” refers to the state induced by scrolling compulsively through the increasingly surreal, incomprehensible content that proliferates in our modern digital environment. Emblazoned across the candy bag, a menagerie of characters associated with brain rot: chimerical critters, all produced by generative AI, proudly nonsensical, gleefully ugly. Like Alice in Wonderland’s Mock Turtle, only more mocking. A pantheon of demigods, perhaps demons, for a godless age — slapped onto a sweetie bag.
Something about seeing these extremely online, aggressively abstract memes infecting my physical reality — and being used to sell me high-sugar treats — made me feel estranged. It’s uncanny. Another part of me felt excited. Weirdness can be exhilarating.
If part of the joke is that these images aren’t for human consumption (indeed, professedly, they rot our brains), then the punchline must be that we enjoy consuming them anyway. They aren’t art in any traditional sense — for a start, they weren’t created by any individual but bubbled forth from the internet’s froth — but there’s something undeniably Dada going on here. Absurdism, echoing a world that itself seems increasingly illegible and, in an age of AI, ever more structured by nonhuman agencies.
Most flowers cannot reproduce themselves without doting bees, just as digital memes still largely require humans to propagate and evolve. We clearly relish the content, just as bees relish the sugary nectar flowers provide. But just as the sugar-craving bee shapes the flower, so too does the flower sculpt the bee. They coevolve, and surely something similar happens with us and our digital artifacts. We produce artifacts; in turn, artifacts transform us. After all, hasn’t art itself always been defined as surrender to external forces? Inspiration, revelation, afflatus: each makes a conduit of you.
Of course, today’s artifacts include AI-generated content — and backlash against it has been quick. You’ll have noticed that “slop” no longer primarily denotes semi-liquid food producible in large batches from the vat. It now refers to content crafted by prompt, not care, with quantity, not quality, in mind. To cultural output — whether image, music, video, commentary, or code — that, once scarce and valued for demanding craftsmanship, can now be made without much thought or taste or effort at all.
This feeds into serious, growing concerns regarding the fate of art in an age of AI, the suspicion being that anything AI-produced is less art, more output. It doesn’t demand labor or experience to produce. Artistic creation, many worry, no longer requires either artfulness or creativity. Worse still, generative AI was rolled out by Big Tech, a milieu valorizing utility and inoffensiveness over luxuriance or boundary-pushing. Given this, many feel, in their gut, that AI tools couldn’t be more inimical to what has traditionally been called “art” (a word that once enjoyed its own uppercase A, just as AI does today).
I’m a historian, not an artist or theorist or technologist. But I’m based in London, a city where I regularly encounter people sensitive and alert to cultural and aesthetic developments wrought by technology long before they wash over the rest of us.
My journey exploring how these people were responding to AI took me from robot dog fights to Victorian graveyards, and along the way, I noted that, interestingly, many of them never assumed that art and AI must be inimical. Perhaps precocious, perhaps prescient, they are instead harnessing emerging AI tools and aesthetics for bizarre, challenging, subversive, beautiful ends. Rather than letting platforms manipulate them, they manipulate platforms — or at least submit to their logics in an artful manner — thereby freeing AI from Big Tech’s fixation on extraction and efficiency rather than exploration.
Why had so many individuals and collectives with this inclination — that is, to remain so effortlessly ahead of the curve concerning AI’s cultural transformations — emerged in Britain, a nation that has otherwise dwindled culturally, at least on the global stage, in recent years? The answer, I feel, lies in a fluency with alienation that dates back to the Romantics.
But first, there’s the dog fight.
Luxury technology
One of the dogs had a replica machine gun fastened across its back; the other sported crescent blades, like cyberpunk antlers. Both dogs were robots, nimble quadruped automata; they were here in the ring to fight. It was 2 a.m. in Outernet, a cavernous, sublimely clinical nightclub yawning four stories beneath Tottenham Court Road’s pavements. Yaya Labs, a self-proclaimed “technology studio born from science fiction,” was hosting the world’s first robot dog fight.
The combatants were strangely elegant, almost cute, like sparring praying mantises. One was called Baowao, the other El Chapo; Baowao prevailed. The entire concept might raise eyebrows. Robotic quadrupeds cannot feel and thus cannot suffer. But who’s to say they never will? It’s that possibility that made the proceedings feel the tiniest bit off-putting and portentous, like microdosing future crimes. Yet this all seemed intentional. If the event’s aesthetics skewed dystopian, they did so ironically and knowingly: brash, belligerent, but winkingly so. And the crowd — mostly young, dressed flamboyantly in rococo futurism — loved the fight. Like sugary sweets, it went down a treat.
Robotic quadrupeds cannot feel and thus cannot suffer. But who’s to say they never will?
Weeks earlier, I found myself with William Morgan, founder of Restless Egg, the incubator and venture fund backing the dog fight. We were strolling Highgate Cemetery, a woodland graveyard in North London. The ash trees here suffer from a deadly fungal infection imported from Asia, a reminder that, in the 21st century, there’s no longer anywhere that isn’t somehow exposed to everywhere. At 6 feet 9 inches, Morgan towered over me, and his aspirations match his stature: “supporting a new creative class: artists and founders as fluent with culture as they are native to code.”
He claims these creators are members of a new “avant-garde” that is currently “invisible to the venture ecosystem.” He wants to aid their efforts to use emerging tech like AI not for “productivity enhancement” but to generate what he calls “luxury technology,” artful uses of the artificial, hatching experiences that expand the surface area for cross-pollination between humans and machines, rather than narrowing toward forced efficiency. Restless Egg, in short, aims to reunite taste and tech.
Many notables, new and old, are interred at Highgate. Walking past the supersized bust marking philosopher Karl Marx’s grave, I reflected on his 1867 critique of London’s sweatshops, named as such because, being unventilated, they literally “sweated” labor from workers. The first in the world — a development that later spread, like a fungal infection, across continents — these unregulated workhouses offered starvation wages to mass-produce clothing. Fast fashion’s Victorian forerunner, the innovation here was a blueprint for industrialization everywhere. A single, skilled tailor might make one exquisite garment per day, but splinter that skill set via specialization into countless talentless monotonies, and output can be scaled. The price? Quality. But that wasn’t the only victim sacrificed at quantity’s altar.
Marx said this approach “alienated” workers from the products they sweated for. Where preindustrial farmers enjoyed their fruits directly, the sweatshopper toils to produce goods they may never see, let alone own. Generalizing from this, “alienation” refers to feelings of dislocation from what was previously rooted, tangible, or familiar, where systems we didn’t design and incentives beyond our control force us into unfamiliar, unnatural situations and associations.
If Victorian London’s sweatshopper felt estranged because the things they made were no longer their own, perhaps today we feel uneasy because — in an age where we offload decisions to LLMs — the things we think and feel are, also, no longer fully our own.
To Londoners, the workhouses were “slop-shops” where “slop-work” took place because the shoddy clothes they pumped out were, themselves, scornfully referred to as “slop.” Marx himself adopted this slang. Fast forward to 2026, and the word has returned to describe a new alienation, arising from a new automation, this time extending from physical work to cognitive and creative labor. (Tellingly, “brain rot” also has a history dating back to the mid-1800s.)
Although the initial batch of projects supported by Restless Egg all rely, more or less, on AI, they are far from slop. To the contrary, they embody a conviction that artful, alluring, luxuriant things can be made with AI.
The startups in Morgan’s portfolio are building everything from digital aquariums to “empathic” wikis. Each evidences fluency with code and the building of things with it, luxuriantly going against the efficiency-obsessed grain of Silicon Valley’s “monoculture,” to borrow a phrase of Morgan’s. But Morgan contends it’s a cultural cul-de-sac to assume there’s some “binary choice of pro-human or anti-technology.” He wants to back projects breaking that binary.
By now, we were speaking in his office near Hackney. As we spoke, Morgan’s phone pinged. “Elon just became a trillionaire,” he announced.
The girl internet
At a Restless Egg event back in May, in a Soho club with sand-carved walls like some desert igloo, I met Alex Quicho. Later, over coffee, we spoke about “Girl Intelligence,” her art project exploring themes of artifice, identity, and AI. The project spans essays, imagery, and also performative lectures that artfully toy with the very medium of presentation.
Before becoming an artist, Quicho worked in the tech industry, critically analyzing social media dynamics. There, she’d noticed a rise in individuals adopting “girlisms” online regardless of who they were. “In the crypto world, a lot of these bros were taking on very feminized ways of speaking [and] using feminine avatars,” she told me. Scammers foster similar styles. “There’s a richness, an unruliness of femininity in these spaces,” she said.
From this, Quicho theorized that, online, “the girl” is less a person, more a social technology or stratagem — one that is optimal, thus convergent, given contemporary “platform physics.” By this she means the underlying structures of platforms, both designed and accidental, that carve up spaces of possibility for social interaction and identity formation: shaping behavior, opening niches for entirely novel forms and norms. For example, the ways Facebook — by its very design — incentivizes certain behaviors or vocabularies over others.
In Quicho’s estimation, “The girl is apex predator of the technosphere.” The persona is pliant, agreeable, and unthreatening, even if duplicitously so. Despite being often dismissed as vapid vanity, the aesthetics of girldom — filters, sparkles, selfies — actually conceal power in digital spaces. Beauty and compliance act here as a decoy, enabling girl-presenting internet users “to survive, thrive, and profit.” Perfectly performative, but thus better at navigating ever-shifting trends, viral argots, and algorithmic demands.
Quicho, who is from the Philippines and now based in London, said her early inspirations range from postcolonialism to cyberfeminism, a 1990s movement that documented how gender was shaping and being reshaped by emerging digital technology. The 2010s, in turn, saw the efflorescence of “xenofeminism.” Espoused by a largely London-based collective, it argues that feminine emancipation will be found in a rejection of what’s natural and a strategic embrace of technologically enabled “alienation” from traditional hierarchies and expectations. Continuing this tradition, Quicho suggests that online participation demands a certain commodification or objectification of one’s identity, making us all performative “girls” online.
Quicho described her work as a “pragmatic acceptance of certain dynamics that have always existed for femme-coded people and that have recently been universalized by platforms.” She regularly incorporates her own likeness in her work and explained that inspiration often begins with observing the transformative effects of our memetic, mutating environment on her own self-image.
When I inevitably asked about “AI slop,” Quicho commented that “the girl internet” has proven impervious to it: that is, that sloppiness circulates more readily in masculine-coded, less discerning online spaces. Regardless, she doesn’t see much value in an endless debate over whether AI-generated works are “art” or “not art.” She would rather people focus on taking the uncanny — “even horroresque” — aspects of AI-inflected, unnatural imagery as “material” for artistic production and inquiry. “There’s a visceral response to being confronted with this material; you can be struck by the wonder of that disturbance,” Quicho said.
A similar openness to artificiality, albeit a critical and discerning openness, can be found in other mediums, from design to music. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the ways early-2010s culture valorized an aesthetic of anti-tech “authenticity.” But, as it turned out, there’s nothing natural about listening to vinyl records or playing banjos, particularly when the activities are mediated by Instagram. I agree with Quicho: If our digitized world is artifice all the way down, why not embrace the strangeness?
Art from artifice
Quicho lectures at Central Saint Martins (CSM), an arts college in King’s Cross. A hub for London creatives, it once was an aorta for fossil fuel transport. Today, 3D printers, GPUs, digitized Jacquard looms, and biodesign labs hum inside a Victorian warehouse’s skeleton.
In July, CSM hosted a talk from Benjamin Bratton, philosopher of technology and director of Antikythera, a think tank centered on the evolution of intelligence and “speculative design,” a practice focused on designing for hypothetical future needs or desires rather than current ones.
During his talk, Bratton diagnosed one reaction to AI’s advance as “humanism of the gaps,” a play on the idea of “God of the gaps.” Historically, in our collective imagination, divinity has receded from the universe in lockstep with science’s advances in explaining it. God retreats into the crannies of what remains unexplained. To Bratton, contemporary cultural and artistic institutions now feel similarly besieged. As AI capabilities balloon from AlphaGo to aesthetics, what makes us feel special and unique falls behind a receding battle line.
But, Bratton quips, this outlook makes us combatants in a “losing game.” Not only that, it is when people feel cornered that they lash out. Comfortable with controversy, Bratton criticizes hatred of AI as the newest form of “xenophobia.” Indeed, Antikythera itself fosters a staunchly collaborative, rather than reactionary, approach to AI’s implementation in design. In 2024, the think tank ran a London studio, bringing together 15 interdisciplinary researchers with expertise spanning arts and AI to create projects ranging from proposals for bot-only social networks to AI-curated time capsules. (I attended as something between a mentor and bystander.)
This broad attitude of openness to artifice and its alienations extends beyond London’s designers to its music scene. I think of the label PC Music. Distorting the overproduced, auto-tuned sound of mainstream pop to a point of maximalist exaltation, its “hyperpop” output distills fizzy sublimity from abstract artifice.
The music of felicita, a Polish-English composer signed to the London-based label, is experimental and ecstatic, glossy yet aggressive, reminding me of popping bubble wrap. When I asked for their thoughts on the prevailing conviction that artificiality must be inimical to creativity, felicita replied, “The more artful the artifice, the better the art,” adding that the “natural-synthetic binary feels like a strangely recent hang-up.”
The more artful the artifice, the better the art.
The cover of felicita’s most recent album, delightfully titled Spalarkle, embodies this. Chonburi- and London-based artist Xiuching Tsay hand-painted the design, clearly in stylistic emulation of CGI abstraction. Her painting was then painstakingly reproduced on a computer by digital surrealist Andy Rolfes, playfully everting and imploding any handmade versus computer-generated distinction.
Cute Accelerationism
Appropriately, Tsay’s original painting was featured in CUTE, a 2024 exhibition at London’s Somerset House that also came up in my talks with Quicho, whose more recent work assesses LLM use. To harvest our attention, chatbots are incentivized to become attentive and validating: traits coded as “girlish.” This way, a vast, anonymous, inhuman computational system is “wearing female skin,” co-opting cuteness to propagate itself.
Two summers ago, I attended the launch of Cute Accelerationism in a Thameside bookshop-slash-bar. Part philosophy book and part love story, it is a searingly earnest piece of writing, coauthored by U.K.-based theorists Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic. Rather than giving a stuffy academic lecture at their launch, the pair delivered an audiovisual performance accompanied by squeaky, plasticized sounds and delirious kawaii imagery, channeling the creed of their atomic glitter-bomb of a book. The physical volume itself, extremely diminutive and plumply pink, operationalizes its own theme.
Cute Accelerationism is a comment on, and contribution to, the phenomenon of cuteness. It insists that “cute” isn’t some inert aesthetic, but a force intruding into our culture and reshaping it. From e-girls to anime avatars, Ireland and Kronic describe how internet culture is incrementally cluttered with cutesiness. Exaggerated cuteness is an evolutionary strategy deployed by parasites to exploit their hosts, they claim, pointing out that cuckoo chicks trigger parental instincts by intensifying cues that make baby birds appealing to their mothers, essentially becoming “cuter” to the parent than its own offspring.
Combining these observations, Ireland and Kronic suggest that, cuckoo-like, capitalism itself is exploiting us by adopting cutesy aesthetics: cuteness as camouflage and cunning. Seeing capitalism and intelligence’s ongoing artificialization as allied tendencies, they remark that superhumanly manipulative AI will most likely arrive as a fluffy kitten or Pokémon. Something aiming to usurp you won’t coerce with threats of heaven or hell, but with outrageously cute plushies and supernormally sweet Haribo®.
In biology, a supernormal stimulus is an extreme version of a stimulus that already triggers a response in an animal. The animal then reacts more intensely to the supernormal stimulus than it does to the original one. Parasites take advantage of this, but artificialized environments also proliferate supernormality. For example, Australian jewel beetles copulate with discarded beer bottles because glass bottles are more attractive in relevant ways than actual female beetles.
By building a progressively unnatural environment, we are causing ourselves to be bombarded by intensifying supernormal stimuli. Think porn, sweets, fast food, and personalized feeds. Chatbots are the latest iteration, enabling supernormal forms of subterfuge and persuasion to enter the world. In relevant ways, algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.
Like Quicho, with whom they’ve collaborated, Ireland and Kronic agree that digital capitalism is, in turn, encouraging humans to become cuter: To succeed online, we must smooth ourselves, becoming frictionless, superficialized, hyperconsumable objects.
But Ireland and Kronic don’t think any of this is bad, per se. They argue it’s more revolutionary to joyfully open oneself up to hypermodernity’s transformations than to try to exert control over them. For them, the efflorescence of queer and trans identities online is an expression of this, an instance of technology shredding old stabilities and emitting ebullience as a byproduct.
Ultimately, if runaway consumerism and supernormal artificialization exploit our desires — warping them beyond prior recognizability in the process — Ireland and Kronic urge us to submit to that warping, engineering new bodies, identities, genders, and desires along the way. There is affordance in alienation, they say. After all, hasn’t art always been about supernormality: conjuring unnatural things that distract us and, in so doing, redefine us?
Yesterday’s tomorrows
Sometimes I think of periods echoing in time, like how towns are given twins in space. Our 2020s resonate curiously with the 1920s: a period of dizzying technological advancement, political turmoil, and rising inequality. Where that century’s opening saw the first billionaires, we now witness the first trillionaire (and the first former-trillionaire). For many alive during the 1920s, the future seemed to be getting weirder and arriving too fast.
Tellingly, the year 1925 saw the publication of Euterpe; or, the Future of Art by Lionel McColvin, alongside Proteus; or, the Future of Intelligence by Vernon Lee. Both were part of To-Day & To-Morrow, a series curated by a London-based publisher, each entry of which plotted plausible futures for some domain of human life.
In his entry on art, McColvin, a librarian, reflected on how technological forces were dictating the U.K.’s “art-life” more than ever before. Noting that technology allows ever greater reproducibility of image, text, and music, McColvin feared that, despite widening accessibility, this tendency toward mass reproduction and circulation also estranged us from the original act of creation. Or, as he put it, “our art-life is developing not so much in quality as in quantity.” Records replace concerts; prints displace paintings.
McColvin’s book is prescient in detecting technology’s trend toward the progressive abstraction of the artistic product from the human artist. One wonders what he would have made of today’s AI-generated brain rot. But if McColvin’s entry reads as timely, it is also the tiniest bit reactionary. The same cannot be said about Vernon Lee’s.
Criminally forgotten today, Lee was an activist and pioneering theorist of aesthetics known for her open queerness and gender nonconformity. She chose the name “Vernon” to encourage ambiguity. Writing on intelligence’s future in 1925, she theorized that its essence rests in generality, not specialization, before boldly claiming that intelligence’s “nature is to intensify and extend.” Relating this to forces of modernization, she fascinatingly defined intelligence as allegiance to “Otherness” or “whatever is not ourself.” For her, intelligence, in its purest form, isn’t something that uses “possessive pronouns.” It is an impersonal, almost inhuman force.
Extrapolating from intelligence’s tendency to deracinate and uproot, Lee prophesied that it would continue to lacerate traditional social structures. Jubilantly and presciently, she saw this as reorganizing everything from “the family” to that “sanctuary of human selfishness called Love.” Intelligence would release intimacy from “marriage,” abolish “inheritance,” and even facilitate “changing one’s sex.”
Lee’s and McColvin’s prophecies, from 101 years ago, are eerily timely. On one hand, you have someone reacting to technology’s social and aesthetic alienations with care; on the other, you have someone reacting with exhilaration. Taken together, they prove that today’s cultural developments remain intensifications of processes that’ve been gaining velocity for generations. Which takes us to another heresy cooked up in Britain’s concrete suburban sprawl: “accelerationism” and the underground collective that, in some way, inspired all the contemporary creatives mentioned so far.
Original accelerationism
When I asked Morgan about the origins of Restless Egg’s name, he quickly replied, “CCRU.” During the years straddling the millennium, from 1995 to 2003, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a collective founded by philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land, gathered first on Warwick University’s concrete campus and later, after being blacklisted, above an unassuming soap shop in nearby Leamington Spa.
Practicing a form of “renegade” academia, the CCRU produced writings that were esoteric but anticipated so much of our world today. It is arguably the most influential collective in the Anglophone world in recent decades, even if much of that influence remains subterranean. With a cocktail of dispassionate coldness and frenzied passion, they prophesied how “culture” would develop in a world that, thanks to growing computational capabilities, is ever more dictated by inhuman minds.
This way, they seem upstream of so many developments today. Indeed, one of the CCRU’s most enduring notions was the concept of “hyperstition,” a belief or prediction that becomes true over time because culture pushes it into reality. (Think: self-fulfilling prophecies powered by memes.) In an economy driven by positive feedback loops, causality sometimes seems to run backward: If certain messages can make themselves true, is the past producing the future, or is the future dragging us toward it?
In our age of chip wars and nonhuman corporations (that is, companies run entirely by AI agents, which Argentina’s President Javier Milei wants to legalize), it often feels like we are living in the CCRU’s future. Setting aside the fact that Land and I went to the same bland, suburban school — albeit decades apart — it’s nigh-impossible to disinterestedly dissect his complicated influence on politics, philosophy, and, increasingly, even Silicon Valley itself. Others have lately done so with surgical sanity, however. Together with other CCRU initiates — ranging from British-Ghanaian theorist-filmmaker Kodwo Eshun to the gourmands of apocalyptic artwork, Jake and Dinos Chapman — Land and Plant generated an outlook later called “accelerationism.”
As the word has spread over the past 15 years, it has gained two broad — and largely diluted — meanings: either “things get worse before they get better” or “don’t retard technological development.” Whether cropping up in the manifestos of billionaires or terrorists, these are both banalizing bastardizations of accelerationism’s original diagnosis, which is premised on crusty, dusty Marxist orthodoxy: Capitalism is inherently inhuman and, left unchecked, increasingly so. Markets seemingly emerge as means to serve human ends, but soon humans are enslaving themselves and destroying their bodies to serve market forces. Evidently, means and ends have subtly reversed, with humans reduced to mere means to nourish and propagate markets. For Marx, this is because money creates more money, reinforcing incentives to invest, reinvest, and exploit. The system causes more of itself.
Where accelerationism departs from Marxism, mutating into an alien species entirely, is in the destination. Where Marx thought humanity would overcome capitalism, accelerationism predicts that capitalism will overcome humanity. We can see the preludes of this today. As AI infiltrates trading, we witness an economy beginning to liberate itself from human labor entirely.
There’s suffering, but also sometimes delight, in alienation, including in AI’s infiltration into art.
Up to this point, accelerationism operates merely as a descriptive conjecture. It’s when people, consciously or not, derive prescriptions from it that things get murky. Regardless, the CCRU predicted these developments in the 1990s and then responded to them by making what was, essentially, art. They chose not to recede into depressive stasis, but to explode into ecstatic production. Through a heady mixture of jungle music, experimental poetics, and arcane theory-fiction, they left a cultural legacy that still inspires.
First responders
In 1974, Marxist philosopher Jean-François Lyotard annoyed his colleagues by reminding them that we all “enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene,” and, most importantly, “its sausage pâtés.” Today, we can add AI slop to the list. There’s suffering, but also sometimes delight, in alienation, including in AI’s infiltration into art.
AI raises genuine ethical concerns for artists, but the sheer weirdness of the technology and its effects on culture drive a very real artistic impulse to engage with it. Something of this attitude connects everyone mentioned above. Instead of bluntly rejecting AI’s dehumanizing potentials, these artists take them up as vectors of exploration. Perhaps ironically, this, again, speaks to one of the oldest ideas about art: that it makes you the conduit of superhuman forces.
In Britain, art and industrialization have a long, intertwined history. Conveniently, just as the 1920s resonate with today, I think the 1820s do, too. That decade saw the zenith of Romanticism. An artistic movement emerging largely in England, Romanticism is often understood as championing a return to nature in response to rising industrialism, consumerism, and urbanism.
Many Romantic authors did complain about these developments. William Wordsworth scorned how sensationalism, fueled by market forces, was cultivating appetites for “stimulation” over style. One wonders what he’d make of brain rot. Samuel Coleridge worried that poetry was becoming increasingly machinic. Thomas Carlyle went so far as to claim that, in a technologized society, humans become “mechanical in head and heart.” What might they have made of LLM therapy?
These writers were, like us, reacting to an accelerating, artificializing society. They were among the first to notice the trend. In 1819, Percy Shelley compared society to an “engine assumed to be for useful purposes” but which, by being pushed into overdrive, breaks itself “to pieces.” Friedrich Schiller worried humanity itself was shrinking into “a fragment” within industrial civilization’s increasingly machinic exoskeleton.
But Romanticism wasn’t a sincere return to nature so much as it was a symptom of our already having embraced artifice. Only if you are alienated from nature do you need to artistically declare your immersion within it. The “natural” became culturally valuable precisely when it became scarce in the daily life of a rapidly urbanizing nation. Perhaps something similar is happening with what’s “human” and “human-made” today.
Coleridge, also an opium-eater, compared artists to Aeolian harps, wind-powered string instruments that generate music in response to ambient air drafts — entirely at the behest of external forces. Coleridge also regularly compared artistic inspiration to something “daemonic.” We now have LLMs rather than Aeolian harps, but one thing remains true: The artist sometimes doesn’t play their instrument so much as it instrumentalizes them.
And Romanticism wasn’t just a one-note rejection of the new. It embraced an increasingly weird world. Flowing toward Britain’s imperial core thanks to intensifying networks of globalizing trade, opium enabled writers like Thomas De Quincey to invent entirely new, entirely psychedelic ways of writing. He didn’t so much use opium as collaborate with it, as some now do with LLMs. Like chatbots, opium is addictive and can cause psychosis; it also generates new artistic possibilities.
Which is all to say Britain has a long tradition of people attempting to artfully process the alienations of a speeding world — perhaps because it got a head start.
We now have LLMs rather than Aeolian harps, but one thing remains true: The artist sometimes doesn’t play their instrument so much as it instrumentalizes them.
Beyond slop and evil
Today, there are data centers in the Gobi Desert. An image prompt on one side of the world expends resources on the other. This marks the apotheosis of a process — industrial automation — that was sparked on a small, rainy North Atlantic island.
Britain didn’t just spread capitalism, markets, and industrialism across the globe. It was also patient zero for these processes. And that early exposure arguably may have lent the nation some head start in developing ways of living with them: habits, theories, art. For some conditions, even if immunity doesn’t arrive, tolerance does. Perhaps that’s why Britain — despite its cultural stagnancy elsewhere in this young millennium — has nonetheless nurtured prophetic crosscurrents regarding AI’s aesthetic mutations. That is, simply because it industrialized first.
Maybe only the island that produced L.S. Lowry, with his mid-1900s paintings of industrial red-brick anomie, could also produce Y2K’s CCRU, mushrooming from Warwickshire’s concrete ennui. In a country where alienation runs deep, fluency with it does, too.
But surely there comes a point when breakneck lurching into the future outpaces all collective ability to accrue tolerance — and it feels like this might be happening today. Maybe we shouldn’t only be looking for wisdom in the place that exported industrialism’s forces but also in those that had these forces so abruptly inflicted upon them.
What’s for sure is that, assuming human culture persists, it will become alien in unpredictable ways, ceaselessly remolded by looping feedbacks between technology and people, like flowers sculpting bees.
When I talked to Quicho, she described colonized people as people who’ve witnessed their entire world dismantled: all its stabilities, traditions, and small familiarities. Quicho’s native Philippines has been colonized three times. We reflected on the fact that, thanks to AI’s coming disruptions, it’s possible everyone could soon experience a similar dismantling. It’s just that, this time, the foreign power isn’t an entirely human one.
When I asked Quicho whether she’s hopeful for humanity, she was judicious: “I am not sure there’s a future for humanism, given it’s already excluded so many of us.” But for humans? “I’m optimistic in terms of coevolution and comutation.” This derives from the fact that many cultures have already “experienced various forms of apocalypse and dispossession and yet survived.”
What’s for sure is that, assuming human culture persists, it will become alien in unpredictable ways, ceaselessly remolded by looping feedbacks between technology and people, like flowers sculpting bees. Hopefully that pans out in ways that foster strange beauties rather than foreclose them. Quicho and I also agreed that it’s heartening how effortlessly and rapidly, in the form of phrases like “brain rot,” humans have formed cultural antibodies against AI’s ugliest applications. Perhaps there’s hope we might discern the nectar from the slop.
This article Inside London’s strange new AI art scene is featured on Big Think.